ShareThisMANILA – This one is for Ripley’s Believe it or not!
The Court of Appeals has affirmed the conviction of a “demonic father” who molested and raped his 13-year-old daughter for more than a year in their home in Calamba, Laguna, sentencing him to 14,400 years for 360 counts of rape.
The CA dubbed the crime as “worst case record of sexual abuse of a minor in the annals of our jurisprudence.”
In an eight-page decision penned by Associate Justice Mario Guarina III, the CA’s Eighth Division sentenced Carlos Henry Troy Donato Sr., a tricycle driver, to 14,400 years for 360 counts of rape filed by his daughter, whose name was not disclosed by the court to protect her identity.
Donato was originally sentenced to death by the Calamba, Laguna, regional trial court.
The victim said she was subjected by his father’s greed for lust for more than a year and on an almost nightly basis.
The rape went on for 386 days, except on days when she had her menstrual period, if it was her birthday or fiesta, during which time, his father would just force her to give him oral sex.
The girl’s ordeal ended in the summer of 2002, when she and her siblings went to their mother’s relatives in Pangasinan for a vacation.
She said she ultimately admitted her ordeal when her mother’s relatives questioned why she appeared reluctant to return home.
The victim’s mother, upon hearing the news, went home and accompanied her daughter to Camp Crame to report the crime and for the victim to undergo expect medical examination and psychological counseling.
On July 31, 2002, Donato was charged with 386 counts of rape.
When the ruling was appealed before the CA, the sentence was modified to reclusion perpetua, or a maximum of 40 years in prison on each count.
According to the CA, the rapist father failed to controvert the positive identification by the victim, as well as the medico-legal report and the supporting affidavits of witnesses, including the siblings who overheard the cries of their sister.
The appellate court said Donato’s bare denials and alibis would not hold water against the probative weight of positive credible identification.
“The testimony of a rape victim who is still of tender years and brutalized by no less than a person of moral ascendancy in her family is generally given full weight and credence… A rape victim’s actions are most often overwhelmed by fear and emotion rather than by cool logic or reflection,” the Court ruled.
In dismissing the claim of the suspect that her daughter had ample opportunity to reveal her ordeal to other persons, yet she did not do so until after one year, the CA said that Donato was able to “create a climate of psychological terror, numbing his victim into submissiveness and silence.”